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Narcisa called me a few hours ago while I was sitting at the far end of Copacabana, watching the waves roll in at high tide. I checked my watch and it was midnight. She wasn’t looking too good when I dropped her off at nine o’clock and now she calls and she sounds terrible. On the verge of a mental/physical collapse.It’s been coming up fast over the last couple of weeks but now she calls and says “Cigano, help, I’m sick. I am dying, come and get me go go…”And I ask her where she is and she says she’s at the main intersection up in Santa Teresa, not her usual haunt and I tell her “Don’t move, I’ll be there in ten minutes” and off I go flying through the night on the motorcycle and I fly off the green green highway from the beach, tearing through the narrow cobblestone streets of old Catete, my neighborhood, Narcisa’s home and the scene of many of our crimes, up up up the winding road into the hills of Santa Teresa.</p>I found her standing at the trolley stop at the Largo Dos Guimaraes, looking grey and diminished as an old ghost but still with that haunting tragic ethereal beauty that at this point only I can see. She climbed quickly onto the back of the bike and we rode down the hill. She was shaking and coughing to the point that she started wretching so violently that I had to pull over for her to sit in the gutter and wrack her bones with dry heaves till we could move on.

I told her “That’s it, you’re not smoking any more today!” (as if I could ever keep her from going out and doing whatever). And she said that was fine, she was done and didn’t want any more, that she just wanted to sit and drink a soda and catch her breath, so I stopped in front of the old Cafe Lamas and went up to the counter and got her a passion fruit drink.Her face was the color of the sidewalk and her skin as clammy as an old used rubber with a cold sweat. I couldn’t take it any more and I said “I think we should take you to the hospital before you croak”. She shook her head violently like one of those bouncy plastic doggie animals on a drunken cabbie’s dashboard no no no no no hospital Cigano no no no!

 And I said “Jesus, baby, you need to see a doctor. You can hardly talk, you’re all fucked up here…” and she just stood there shaking her head like a stubborn old bitch and said she just wanted to get off the street and go home to my place and smoke a joint she had, take a valium and rest up…At that point I’d pretty much had it and I told her I wanted to get her some help, that I didn’t know what to do anymore and she said just take me home. I had visions of her going nuts again and going all crazy on me so I said no. I wanted her to see a doctor. Then she panicked, thought I was gonna take her to the nut house, her all-time worst fear, of being caged, restrained, sedated, and having just escaped from the horrors of four months of Jesus farm she was still full of trauma of that so she just walked away and left me standing there. Walked off down the dark street, around the corner in her little waif get-up, skinny legs and mini skirt, looking like a twelve-year-old Lolita’s ghost and then she was gone.I instantly regretted my decision and I knew this was her way of telling me if I didn’t just take her home and give her shelter, then somebody else would and it wouldn’t take her long to get picked up looking like that, wandering the pre-dawn streets of any neighborhood.She’d been depending on the protection of strangers, older men and gringos since she’d hit the streets at twelve and she knew the game, knew what sort of sob stories those men liked to hear, how she was just a lost confused little schoolgirl who’d run away from home and just needed a place to stay and some care and feeding and would gratefully return the kindness with her virginal innocence. Wasn’t that the sweet little routine she had going when I’d first met her years ago when she really was a homeless teenager out for whatever? Now she was way over twenty-one and therefore something of a fraud, but by the looks of her a convincing one and in the dark late Sunday night shadows only I knew the truth and I didn’t much care, I just wanted to find her before anybody else did and tell her I was sorry and I’d play it by her rules, that I got it and it was cool.Well, I got on the bike and rode all around those dark streets teeming with homeless shadows and prowling cars and stray cats looking for her but I already knew I’d blown it and she was gone, far far away, she could be anywhere, and then all the scenarios started filling my mind, as the seeds that had been planted long before started to sprout their seven hundred heads of insecurity and menace and loss. Shit. She was gone. Gone.Hopped in a passing car with somebody, anybody, off to the next sordid adventure, the next quick trick, hitched a ride in a cab for a quick blow job to Copacabana and the next gringo, the next dissapearing act to nowhere, to everywhere, to outer space, back to Alpha Centauri without so much as a kiss goodbye. Shit.What had I done? I rode around and around until I knew for sure she’d flown the coop and I rode all the way to Copacabana and as I rode down the long ho stroll we both knew so well the visions and ghosts danced behind my eyes and I stopped the bike in front of “Help”, the big gringo whorehouse where I knew she’d worked her magic on so many men over the years. I stood there watching the familiar depressing proceedings, the same old tired faces and sad phoney mercinary heartless mating rituals, torturing myself, driving myself nuts until I couldn’t take any more and I got back on the bike and headed back to the neighborhood.

THE CASA VERDE:

Casa Verde, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

I rolled up to the Casa Verde for the third time in the last desperate hour and this time I saw her friend Pluto, Narcisa’s twin beggar spirit, a sort of male version of her, sitting out front in the middle of a pile of garbage, staring into space in the dark. I stopped the bike and asked if he’d seen Narcisa. He just pointed down the street and said, “Here she comes…”I looked down the street and sure enough there she was walking toward the Casa Verde. I rolled the bike down the hill and stopped beside her.”Baby. Why’d you run off? I was worried about you…”"You the one what leave me all ‘lone, Cigano.”I could see there was no use arguing, even though it seems that’s what we do most, besides fucking… Self-justification is her shield and her buckler on the battlefield of human relations and I just let it go at that. “Sorry” was all I said and I meant it.I’d learned my lesson again and who was I to try and make her see her errors? Its not my job. I was just happy to have found her and have her back, her skinny waif arms and legs wrapped around me from behind as we made our way back down the street towards my place again. When we got home she stripped off her skimpy garb and gave me a memorable fuck and as soon as I got up in her I knew again instantly why I put up with all her shit. Every fucking time… All of it.She’s the one and for now at least that was that for us both. I think that Narcisa, like me, knows good and well that none of this will last, nothing is permanent.Maybe that’s why she insists on everything all at once right now go go, because like she’s said before “I’m twenty-one years old Cigano and soon I’ll be old and fat and done and just let me live it the life how I wanna live now.That’s Narcisa. No past, no future, live live live as intensely as possible, a totality of experience, love and hate and joy and terror and sensations, just for today.That’s what her tattoo says, “so por hoje”, the tattoo I did on her shoulder that time she tried to get clean and go to the NA meeting in Ipanema every night till one day she just kicked me to the curb hard and ran off with that nasty wino lesbian poet. Just for today. I’d taken her to my friend Beto Sata’s studio in Copacabana and tattooed it on her shoulder right below the black ball where I’d covered up the satanic pentagram she’d tattooed on herself when she was 14 years old, in a dubious effort to close the gates to hell she’d opened up from that tender age, before I’d first met her. Just for today. After she relapsed (first on weed and wine with that cursed lesbo, then soon right back to smoking crack, the express lane to hell) she would look at that tattoo and joke that just for today she was gonna smoke crack. Just for today.But even that wasn’t enough for Narcisa, more more more, and she wanted me to do another tattoo on her, the words “e agora?” (what now?) going all the way down her forearm. That was better, she said, than “just for today”, more immediate, more… now. What now? Right now, Cigano, go go go… Narcisa. But we never got around to doing that tattoo cause she could never sit still or focus for long enough to go with me and do it.”Just for today” was just a fluke, or maybe cause when we did it, just for that day she really had been making an effort to slow down and stay calm and find some focus, some discipline and put her life in some kind of order. It didn’t last very long, but whatever, the tattoo will be there to haunt her for as long as she lives, which may not be much longer if she doesn’t wake the fuck up soon. Narcisa really is living just for today and, one way or another I gotta hand it to her, she does it with great class and distinction.In fact, I’ve never seen such poetry and style in the act of self-destruction - and I’ve seen a lot of that, believe me. Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

After I left the whorehouse tonight I sat at a little table at the end of Vila Mimosa and had a nice bowl of soup and talked to a whorehouse acquaintance- a biker I know from other carnivals in Copacabana- about my trials and tribulations with Narcisa and he seemed to sympathize which surprised me a bit and then I told him I’d written a book about her and the old lady who served me the soup told me she too had written several books, but that the last one had been channeled right through her directly from the spirits… My phone rings and right on time it’s Narcisa. She wants to see me.I pulled on the street by my building and she’s standing there on the corner looking beautiful, transcendent glowing on fire like the wild animal Goddess Whore of Babylon Dakini she is and I roll up and say to her, “Why do you think you gotta lie to me?” She plays dumb so I just give her a hug and say “I know you weren’t at Fernanda’s, you went to turn a trick”.She said she lied cause she didn’t want to hurt my feelings and I said “Baby I know you better than you know yourself so there’s no point in lying to me. I know you and I love you because of the way you are, wild savage immoral beautiful so don’t bother trying to be what you’re not - not for me cause only that would really hurt my feelings.”

She got it and hugged me hard and fast and said “Ok Cigano that’s enough let’s go now go go go!”And we hopped on the bike and she squeezed me harder and we blasted off into the night. We stopped at a little hole in the wall bar near Lapa where she gave me an unaccustomed accounting of her earlier adventures, telling me that even with her lies, it had been, in part, true. I said how’s that? and she said she really had had a run-in with the cops. 

She’d been on her way over to my place when the trick pulled along in a shiny new car and offered her 40 for a quick fuck which is ten more than I give her and she couldn’t resist. She told me it was her intention to get the cash up front and then beat it, one of her oldest tricks, but the trick had driven her to an isolated lover’s lane spot up in the hills and just as they got ready to do the evil deed, the cops showed up, coitus interruptus, and extorted a c-note from the would-be trick. Then she beat it outta there, keeping her 40 without delivering the goods, according to her.I guess Narcisa is just bad luck for all sorts of folks- a general-purpose jinx. True or not… I really don’t know what to believe, ever, but it all made for an entertaining story and even made me a little hornier. I couldn’t wait to get her home and bang the shit out of her. First she wanted to get a soda but I shoulda known she just wanted the can to smoke crack from and sure enough she still had some on her so after a quick but passionate fuck on my sofa, the rest of the night was a total wash as she tweeked and festered and crept like a shellshocked spider around the battlefield of her melting mind, crawling around my little apartment in a bug-eyed paranoid fit…I couldn’t even get her to give up another fuck so I just watched as she crept off into the night. It was 4 am at that point, still an hour or so before my usual dawn bedtime so I took a ride back over to the Vila with the idea of a last fuck nightcap with this one little princess, but by the time I got in there at that late hour she’d already closed the coffin and the place was a piss-stinking nightmare of fat old jelly-assed horror-monkeys and drunken cum guzzling fuck monsters so I beat it home and had a wank thinking of some glorious combination of Narcisa and the earlier angel. Then I rolled over and fell into a deep sleep.The dream was sinister, as usual when it involves Narcisa - I dreamt we were in Isreal or Russia and ran into some cosmic joker acid-eyed freaky friends of hers and she was talking with them in some strange exterrerestrial language I couldn’t fathom and ignoring me as usual as if I wasn’t there, when suddenly this big fucking pit bull comes running out of their weird nomadic Bedoin tent and lunges at my nutsack and just grabs it there like that and won’t let me go. Talk about feeling impotent… and I just look at the dog’s wild-eyed hippy owner and he looks back at me all spacy-eyed and then, as if it was an afterthought, he croaks a one syllable command at the pit in that weird language of theirs and the dog let’s go of my balls.I woke up in a groggy cold sweat. As if on cue from another world, my doorbell rings and it’s Narcisa, of course, who else would it be at 7 in the fucking morning? And once again I’m sleep deprived and pissed off and fearing for my life, my sanity, and she doesn’t care, she needs money and she’s gonna get it one way or the other so I just opt for the easy, nonviolent way and throw her the boner and pay up and she’s gone like it was all another bad dream. Such is my life.

And I don’t even care what she does with the money cause I’m getting all the sex a man could ever dream of wanting and now I can go back to sleep - after all it’s only money, right? That’s what Narcisa always says and maybe she’s right. Sometimes she’s quite wise, even at the height of her darkest, most psychotic mad dementia- and I guess that, along with the great and plentiful sex magick is the great attraction and addiction to her supersonic crack and all the twisted insane rationale that comes with it.So off she went into the blazing sun of her continued mission as I rolled over and went back to sleep again as if, in consantly interrupted little increments, I could somehow accrue something resembling a full night’s sleep. Of course it really doesn’t work out that way.I read in some Brazilian youth culture magazine a piece about the devastating effects of institutionalized sleep deprivation on modern culture, how it said that it didn’t even matter how much sleep you got if you didn’t get at least four hours a day of deep, uninterrupted sleep you will lose all efficiency and ability to function eventually. Great! I remember feeling a perverse sense of satisfaction and comfort just knowing that at least I wasn’t alone in my misery and hey, at least I’m getting laid. It seems like the two biggest factors leading to mass social decadence and dysfunction are sleep deprivation and sex deprivation. At least I’m not suffering from both like most of the pathetic sheeple of the crippled, mind-controlled world. Shit. But it gets grim when you don’t sleep. I know.Sure enough a couple of hours later, she’s back waking me from another couple of hours of deep sleep – it’s always just under the prerequisite 4 hours, coincidentally - and this time I’m really tired and pissed at being woken again but she puts on her saddest puppy dog in the rain face and I let her in and she lays down on the sofa all sad and beat and tells me she wants some love and affection and for me to come and lay with her but I’m just not feeling very loving or affectionate in that sleep-deprived state at ten in the fucking morning but I try and I lie down beside her and it hits me like a garbage can emptied over my head.She smells like an open sewer, like a rotting cadaver and I can’t take it. I tell her she needs to take a shower and she swears up and down it’s not her making the smell it must be a garbage truck outside my window and she goes to point out the window and of course there’s no garbage truck, it is her rotting soul. And she finally goes to the shower grumbling and complaining the whole time until she’s worked herself up into a minor frenzy and I am so fucking tired as she rants on, her words boring into my brain like an electric drill and I can feel myself wanting to kill her and get it over with so I can get some sleep and now she’s got me on the defense cause I really don’t wanna kill her. Too messy. So I just back down and beg her to calm down and forget anything I said and let’s just lay down and sleep but by now she’s getting dressed all sexy and next thing she’s suddenly seduced me expertly.Now I’m working it up into her as she talks on, telling me all sorts of magical things of the world unknown, and I am gone gone gone again, trapped in her crazy spell of gutter sex magick and I don’t care about sleep or sanity or life or death anymore I just want to fuck fuck fuck her and I’m coming and howling in pain ecstasy madness joy and she’s already up on her feet snatching my money off the bedside table chanting “Thank you come again” as she shape-shifts back into her clothes and beats it out the door again.I fall back exhausted on the sofa, still bathing in her presence, her raw animal smell and essence and then I pass out and dream of grinning death-head spirits of addiction and damnation until she comes back an hour later and wakes me again for the next fuck…. Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

The Ego is made up of the persisting elements, in the adult psyche, of the original nature of the child. Certain aspects of the infant’s psyche may be usefully examined. There are three factors which should receive attention. The first is, as Freud observed in his priceless phrase “his Majesty the Baby,” that the infant is born ruler of all he sees and surveys. He comes from the Nirvana of the womb, where he is usually the sole occupant, and he clings to that omnipotrnce with an innocence, yet determination, which baffles parent after parent. The second, stemming directly from the monarch within, is that the infant tolerates frustration poorly and let’s the world know it readily. The third signifigant aspect of the child’s original psyche is its tendency to do everything in a hurry…”- Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, M.D.I picked Narcisa up in front of the Casa Verde just after she’d presumably smoked the last of her crack. Her eyes were bugging out of her head like she’d seen a ghost or a batallian of ghosts and she most likely really had, that’s what days of sleep deprivation and self-induced crack psychosis will do to her or anybody else. She really looked bad. Worse than a few hours earlier, and she didn’t look too good then. Shit.We got up in my apartment and she was still tweeking hard, looking around like a scared animal, waiting for all sorts of demons to come scrambling out of the woodwork and eat her alive or whatever. Jesus. She’s up, then sits down then jumps up like she sat on a nail. Then she runs over and turns out the lights and I say no no no no no, I don’t want to sit in the dark so she puts the light back on and slithers over and cowers in the corner like a sick old dog.  And still with all her spun out fearful terror show of horrors and frights and spooky self-inflicted misery, still she has the arrogance to complain about the music on the jazz radio, saying it’s too slow and depressing, it’s for old retarded people and the light is too bright, and then she’s just ranting and complaining in general, complaining to complain, making these little tsk tsk noises at everything in sight, not to mention things that are mostly invisible to me. The good news? All this is a sure indication, I’m thinking, that she’s coming in for a crash landing, that no matter how much she smokes at this point, the shit just isn’t working for her anymore and she’s endlessly vexed because of that very fact.  Anyway, I go over to where she’s sitting on the floor and I try to sit beside her and she shrinks away from me like I was Turd Man or something so I just get up and go over and sit on the sofa and pick up my little notebook and start writing. Then she looks at me with the most paranoid suspicious look of utter contempt and asks me why I’m always writing in that book, as if I was writing out her ego death or something which, in a way, I am.I’m definitely exposing her diseased insanity for her to take a good look at. That’s for sure. But that’s the problem. She will not look, just absolutely refuses to read the book I just wrote about her… 

She knows I’m still writing about her and she doesn’t like it one bit. I just stopped and looked over at her pissed off frustrated indignant face and that was it. I had to restrain myself from blasting her in the mouth with a knuckle sandwich. There’s only so much senseless insanity and abuse a man can take- though there are those who would say my capacity for shit-eating is boundless when it comes to Narcisa.  Finally I just looked at her and said, “Ya wanna know why I’m always writing in these little books? Ill tell you why. I do it so I don’t have to end up like you, ya miserable cunt… Bored, restless, irritable, discontent, critical, paranoid and pissed off at everybody and everything all the time, living in a constant state of mute, indignant, powerless terror and hate and self-pity. That’s why I’m always writing in this little book. So as not to have to sit festering like you in the shitty sewer of a frustrated, undisciplined mind, so I don’t have to be constantly seeking some unattainable chemical or emotional relief from the prision of all these trauma-based emotions and a constant state of boredom that would have me sucking on a crack pipe just like you if I didn’t do something creative with the terrible thoughts and visions that plague this untended shithole mind of endless trauma memory you call your ‘self’! Thank God I have a little book to write in and channel my thoughts and fears and nightmares into some form of creative expression, some semblence of sanity for somebody who’s every bit as capable of murder and suicide as you are. An undicsiplined, unoccupied mind is the most dangerous instrument of destruction in the world and I got a bad brain too, just like yours, filled with memories of harms and fucking hurts and spiders and rats and bats and things that crawl in the shadows - but I DO something with it so it doesn’t run my life into the gutter like yours does to you. You just go on in the living hell of a stifled frustrated poet. You’d really be better off dead.”"Fuck you, Cigano! Bla bla bla, that’s all you know for do is talk you e’stupid words that mean nothing. I got nothing to lose an’ I wan’ nothing, so what I gotta do anything for? I just wan’ for die and go ‘way from these shit world an’ all you shit peoples!”  ”That’s cool baby,” I said, almost driving her to a violent reaction, but not quite. “Anyway it could be worse, Narcisa… It could be me. So have a nice death, baby. And may it come soon. I’ll be swimming in the ocean and riding on my motorcycle and eating delicious meals and fucking lots of pretty girls, traveling around the world signing books I wrote about people like you and their bad brain and having a pretty good time, thinking boy it’s too bad Narcisa can’t be here to enjoy all this but she had to go and kill herself and she didn’t even know she just killed the wrong person, stupid cunt!” Sure enough she fell asleep while I was still talking and I waited till she was really out good before I put a blanket over her and thanked God for having let me survive nicely another one of her shitty little pity-parties. Then I rolled over and slept the sleep of the righteous once again. Ah! 

And now she simply is destroyed and getting worse by the minute and I just want to cry cause I remember how, before I came down to Rio, we talked for hours on the phone like excited kids and made all these big plans to go traveling and go to the beach and all these fun things and I told her I’d written a book and she said she wanted to write too and where is it all now? Ashes ashes ashes and she is dying and I am mourning and I wish wish wish it could all be different like in her once sweet innocent fairy tale mind and I curse this disease that destroys lives and dreams and hope and love and turns it all to ashes. Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

MY EASTER:Woke up to the smell of coffee on the stove and Joao Gilberto trickling through the small stereo this morning in the flat on Via Gioia. Had breakfast at the Panicerria in Brera, the downtown distritto dell’arte after not sleeping much Saturday night. Narcisa is FINALLY in the printers, thank God.

Been relating to Jonathan a lot these past few days as my father is also psychically, cosmically, umbillically connected to a young, vivacious, irrational, highly intelligent and half-demented Brazilian woman- dare I compare anyone to Narcisa, but there are a few vague similarities right there. I don’t really have anything bad to say about her, it’s more that I need to learn to practice tolerance toward people that don’t think the same way as me– which is most people. She is confused, I’ve been there. Compassion is the first step I guess.

As far as Narcisa goes. Any reaction is a good one I suppose.

 I remember a few months ago I was reading a short story to a room full of people and one older woman starting crying and choking. Then she blurted out ” Just stop! Just shutup!” And she walked out of the room. As if she felt my pain vicariously through my words. Reliving her self induced trauma. Essentially she fell victim to what I look at as lessons. I paused a beat from reading, not sure what kind of reaction I was supposed to have… But I did all I could think to muster which was this big shit-eating grin. It was a good feeling to affect someone on that level.

So anyway, as I was off to Genova Nick was hopefully handing Narcisa off to Orlando Bloom, another pirate and friend of Jonathan, down in sunny Los Angeles.

My heart was in Milano, just for today. I feel at home there and will most likely end up living there for some period of time in the future.

Anyway. After eating poor Peter Cotton Tail for Easter dinner, I started getting antsy and decided I was sick off spaghetti and jumped on a plane real quick to London. So, here I am. Sitting at a friend of a friend’s flat in East London. It’s very cold here.

Now, if nobody minds, I am going to wax (fair warning).

For all of those who judge Jonathan or myself for what we are trying to do, it’s fine. Just know this:

People are in a constant process of growing all the time. I am not the same person as I was yesterday and in a sometimes very tangible way I can change as a person completely throughout the course of one day. And in that, I have lived many full and prosperous lifetimes in my short time on the earth.

You and I are always changing and moving, literally, the tiny particles that make up the matrix of our perceived reality bouncing around at higher speeds than the human eye can register. So, if for no other reason, THAT is why we’re here on this planet; to grow, to move, to change. To EVOLVE, essentially. We are living organisms. That’s just what we do.

Such is also true of any relationship. Its always shifting, changing, growing and evolving. The Course in Miracles states that Relationships are “assignments”.

It states that there’s no accidents or coincidences in who we become involved with whether on an intimate level, business level, friend level. A blowjob in the backseat of a car. Whatever. Its all the same. We are assigned to one another so that we may serve our highest purpose as an evolving creature- that we may learn from one another through interaction with the human species and thereby causing our brains to expand, which, by any definition of the word is “evolution”.

Marianne Williamson uses the example of a gemologist smoothing a gemstone to describe this process. In her own words, since she can explain it better:

“The raw amethyst rubs up against another raw amethyst and that’s how they are smoothed out. And so it is with you and me, our rough edges rub up against the rough edges of other people. And that’s how we smooth out our rough edges. If we never rub up against any others how then would the edges get smoothed out?”

Good question. They wouldn’t. We’d forever be stuck in the lowest stage of evolution. And rubbing our rough edges against others in an attempt to manifest our Creator is not always easy. Some edges are rougher, sharper, stronger than others. But, our only purpose is to GROW. There is no promise of happy ever after, or nirvana, although that usually comes with the territory over time. Lots and lots of rubbing. Basically, its a very simple formula. A+B is C.

All of the prior being said, it only makes sense that our greatest learning experiences come from relationships that can typically be described as nightmarish trainwrecks, tragic disasters.

Jonathan, like I strive to be, is a true guerreiro, and although he may stray far from the confines of conventional thinking, he has given himself whole-heartedly to the sole purpose of life, to grow. Eventually his amethyst, emerald, and onyx will smooth out, as they have already begun to do. So will Narcisa’s.

And as I was told by my dear friend Louisah once, “NO PRESSURE, NO DIAMOND!!!!!!!!” (and that’s exactly how she said it)I wish you all the same abundance and happiness that I feel on this sub-zero London night. I’m gonna watch Jamie roll on ecstasy now.

xx

 Just for today there is no drama or conflict and everybody’s getting what they need outta this relationship even if it is just sex and money and drugs and love and sympathy and company and humanity, what the fuck else is there really at the end of the day?Shit, everybody’s got relationship problems and there is no happily ever after. That’s a big evil bullshit lie the bastards tried to brainwash us with from little kids with their creeping reptilian brain Disneyland programming.Happy ever after my fucking dick! I much prefer ‘just for today’, or even better, Narcisa’s hyperactive ‘what now?’ works better for us who’ve had all our fairy tale illusions smashed by psychopath parents and psychic rape betrayal and LSD overdrive rude awakenings right from the start. Shit on the American Dream! How’s this for happily ever after?I just got an email from my pal Orbie.Orbie’s Roy Orbison’s kid and a new friend I met while I was up in LA crying my eyes out all day and night for the last four months writing “Our Lady of Ashes” and kicking Narcisa cold turkey while spending fifteen hours a day diving deeply into the inflamed wound of what my friend Lydia Lunch calls “love’s eternal negation”.I was spending a lot of my writing time in the company of Orbie who was then shacked up with my other dear friend Kat Von D- there I go with the names again for all you Hollywood ass-licking sicophants and gossip mongers.Anyway, the fact is that I spent a good amount of my time writing the first draft of my book sitting in Kat’s little tattoo office while she tattooed away into the wee hours every night. During that terrible time, me and Kat and her man at the time, Orbie, were like family, just hanging together for company, and I wound up reading the bulk of the book to them for feedback, just to hear it out loud and know where to tweak it later - whatever, it was all a long crazy painful and cathartic process and I’ll always remember those nights I spent sitting up with Kat and Orbie as my audience and constant companions during a real difficult and painful time for me.And it was almost like I was unconsciously drawn together with those two special people at a time of terrible loneliness and solitary introspection and deep personal mourning for the last dying illusions of happy-ending romantic love. All that time those two were to all outward appearences the “perfect couple” spending all their time together all lovey-dovey and planning their big happily ever after rock-n-roll marriage and future together.

   And it was like a daily rubbing of salt in deep wounds for me on some level as I suffered the forced seperation from my Narcisa while writing it all out all day, everyday as she sat tucked away in that awful Jesus retreat.

I gotta say that it was super painful, almost to the point of masochistic to spend so much time around those two obnoxious lovebirds at just that particular time for me. But they were the friends and family who God or the Devil put in my life to keep each other company on the battlefield of love and sadness and who am I to argue with higher or lower powers at this stage of the game?

But the moral of the story if there is such a thing is this. After all that, here I am back in Rio with Narcisa, the scourge of my existance, my bloody crown of thorns and heavy cross to bear. And somehow we’re living it up, if only just for today. She’s smoking her lungs out and toasting her brains on crack and I’m writing and swimming in the sea and catching waves and riding the night winds with Narcisa. Clinging to me like a hungry little monkey speeding up and down hills through the hungry night and fucking like the damned and eating good food and talking with a few friends from time to time and doing all the things I love to do.Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the land of bullshit happy endings, my dear friends Kat and Orbie, the most perfect little happy couple I ever seen have SPLIT UP after making each other miserable…

And me and Narcisa are living it up for today and what now? And it’s all a big lie!!! So at the end of the day, today’s been a pretty good one and I was sorry to get an email from Orbie who’s as sad and blue as a Roy Orbison song, but that’s how the cookie crumbles I guess and just for today I ain’t complaining and I guess that’s the closest thing to a happy ending I know about and the beat goes on as I sit here by the seaside by my little shack past midnight with a belly full of rice and beans and a dick numb from fucking and salt in my hair from crashing around in the sparkling Brazilian summer waves between fucks all day long and I got no regrets at all and if this is the road to Hell I’m sure as shit taking the scenic route, just for today.

So anyway, it’s Saturday night -  All my friends are out getting hammered in barrooms and parties around town and I’m sitting by the waves just grooving on the cool vibrations of my city by the sea on a long soulful night. Parties and bars I’m not really into, being by nature every bit as antisocial and misanthropic as my dear Narcisa who’s sitting in the dark in an abandoned building across town right now, toasting her brain in a desperate and futile attempt to extinguish her two remaining brain cells who are constantly fueding with each other in her pretty head.Normally it would be my night for a few quick fucks at Vila Mimosa and a stroll by the rock and roll biker bars over there but I’m all fucked out and my money’s almost gone so I’ll just cool it here alone by the flourescent waves till it’s time to go back to Catete and pull Narcisa out of her hole at sunrise for a last desperate shag before I close the coffin on another hot summer Sunday morning with nothing to do but sleep and wait for the roof to collapse.

Sitting alone by the sea basking in the afterglow of what’s been pretty close to a perfect day, I’m thinking how much I really do like hanging out alone and how different that is from the way I used to be when I was younger, Narcisa’s age, always running around like the headless horseman looking for “the action” looking for something or someone to fill some nameless hole in my soul and never ever finding it, at least not for long. Drugs were a good little diversion for my hyperactive, unsatisfied mind for a little while, like 25 fucking years beating my brains out with all kinds of shit on a daily basis till I was finally more dead than alive and still not fucking satisfied. Shit.I can certainly relate to Narcisa’s absolute refusal to do anything about her “problem”, I know from my own experience that all she’s trying to do is survive in a terrible world of ugly memories and traumatic associations not of her making and drugs are the best line of defense. For awhile. My career took me long and far before it took me down and it was a long, long ride. 25 years. Shit.Narcisa ain’t gonna last that long. Not the way she’s going at least. I was a “functional addict” and drugs were my tool for getting around the world and functioning in it and doing what I hadda do to survive the crazy wild violent ride I lived in. But I did get around and I did get some shit done.Narcisa’s just circling the drain at the ripe old age of 21 years old and that makes me sad to see that she’s much worse off than I ever was. Well maybe not really. I mean she’s not jumping out people’s windows with a tv set and sticking needles in her veins like I did for years at her age - at least not yet. So maybe there is still hope for her. I hope so and if I didn’t hold that hope deep in my heart, I probably woulda turned and hightailed it away from her a long time ago…     I just got a call from my new friend, Mayra Dias Gomes, the hip young writer and journalist who’s probably gonna be the one to translate “Our Lady of Ashes” into Portuguese with me. I could probably do it myself, but I like the idea of working with a “legitimate” translator whose actually been to school and knows about grammer and spelling and shit like that, not to mention the fact that she comes from a prestigious Brazilian literary tradition, being the daughter of the venerable Brazilian screen-writer Dias Gomes, and god-daughter of Jorge Amado, one of my own South American literary heros and a sacred cow of world literature by any standards. And she’s a real nice kid and a brilliant writer in her own right.

Anyway she and her boyfriend Alan are on their way over to the “Emporio” bar in Ipenema, and since I’m sitting at the end of Copa less than a 5 minute ride from there I say what the fuck? and I’ll fire up the bike and take a ride over there. I don’t mind that place as much as most places where people gather to drink and talk shit since it has a certain dark druggie rock-n-roll vibe I can sort of hang with and you can hang out on the sidewalk out front and still smell the ocean a block away as opposed to being crammed inside some hot sweaty chatterbox pen surrounded by frenetic drunken sheeple, a real nightmare to my way of thinking.I’ve said it before and ill say it again. I hate drunks! Crackheads are so much more interesting…Well, it’s time to roll, so here I go..

 Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

Today Narcisa came down from the favela looking just like one of those Raggedy Anne dolls I used to see when I was a kid. As a little boy I always thought they looked sexy. I’ve been a sick bastard for a very long time.

She climbed on back of the bike and I took off down the hill with the motor cut off, coasting down the familiar cobble road and she clung onto me as tender as an angel’s kiss and I liked it, I always like it and that’s why I like to coast downhill with the motor cut like that, no hurry, cause now she’s got her drugs and now she feels good and she embraces me tenderly and talks to me, and I can hear her better when she talks to me without the noisy motor and that’s about the only time she ever talks to me and embraces me tenderly like that, when were on the motorcycle riding through the night. So… I like to take my time so as to prolong it and those rare tender moments as long as I possibly can.

“They calling me ‘Emilia’ now up in the boca, Cigano,” she said.

“Who, princesa?” I said, already knowing she was referring to the skinny machine gun-toting teenage bandidos who run the boca, the drug spot up in the favela.

“Os garotos da boca,” she confirmed. “Like the doll, you know because I wearing one clothes over another one…” Referring to the Brazilian version of my long-legged beloved skinny Raggedy Anne doll. Maybe that’s why I love Narcisa so much. I remember the night I first met her years ago, she had been wearing a knee high skirt over two pairs of jeans and two sets of underwear over a bathing suit. When she came home with me, it was like unwrapping an elaborate Christmas present or something. Raggedy Anne. Narcisa.

THE FAVELA

Santa, originally uploaded by Scab Vendor.

“Emilia! Que bonitinha” I said affectionately.

“They were making fun of me…” She said sadly.

“Let them, princesa. I’m not making fun of you. You are my doll, baby. You’re all ragged and torn up and worn out, but you’re the doll God gave me to love and I do love you so.”

She was silent, but the warm squeeze she gave me spoke volumes to my heart. As we got to the corner where we make the turn up to the Casa Verde, the abandoned squatter’s shack where she holes up to smoke crack in the dark with her tribe of other bug-eyed bums and murderers and lost souls, I fired up the bike and accelerated till I stopped in front of that dreary open portal to hell. Then she lept off the back of the bike and disappeared like a big white rat into a hole in the wall and was gone again. I took off back down the hill the way we came, this time gunning the motor hard, vaguely wondering if tonight would be the night of her death.

 Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

This is all surely an ongoing huge enigma for me as is everything about Narcisa.There are deep esoteric occult sciences I’ve always had an attraction to, but very little understanding of, since the time of my childhood. Narcisa has delved deeply into the secret sciences since her childhood and I know that somewhere behind those intense bugged-out eyes there’s a vast universe of hidden wisdom and knowledge of things way beyond my ability to comprehend. And most likely way beyond hers too- and that more than anything else is what’s driven her slowly insane, the fact that she knows there’s something terribly wrong with this world and this reality as it’s force-fed to us by the “status quo”.It must be terribly frustrating for her to possess such advanced knowlege and be unable to find the slightest earthly application for it and that’s probably the main reason she wants out of here and wants to go back to Alpha Centauri where things would probably make a lot more sense to her…The thing that makes it so difficult for us to get along is mainly the fact that, because of great suffering, I’ve been set on a path that requires me to seek the truth and the light, while Narcisa seems to try and do everything in her power to avoid the very things I am obliged to seek. But it’s the avoidence of someone who already possesses great knowledge and, for whatever reasons, wishes they didn’t. I think I can relate to that, being that I spent two years between the age of twelve and fourteen dropping LSD an average of three times a week until I was so confused by the nature of reality and the esoteric knowledge I was exposed to, much too advanced for my young inexperienced mind to assimilate, that at the age of fourteen I simply stopped taking all “mind expanding” drugs and rushed headlong into hard drug addiction in a desperate attempt to reverse the overdose of knowledge and vision I’d opened myself up to.Now I’m seeing it and remembering and even reliving it through Narcisa and suddenly it seems quite clear that she’s simply trying to protect herself from the percieved threat of spiritual things.

That’s why its so easy for her to submerge her mind and body into such depths of drug addiction and then the one time she finally gave herself any chance to recover, it was just as natural to her fearful nature to immerse herself in the simplistic, childish and stupid pie-in-the-sky doctrines of Fundamentalist Christianity- at least until the day her soul cried out in rage at the insane hypocracy and dogmatic bullshit of that primitive Evangelical kindergarten worldview and she just went back to the crack pipe rather than seek any real lasting recovery where she’d have to delve deep into her polluted psyche where all the problems seemed to have started in the first place.

Fuck that, too scary and risky, better to just seek oblivion or insanity, anything rather than risk having to look too closely at the issues that had sent her into this whirlpool of self immolation in the first place…So round and round she goes like a kitten chasing its tail away down the rabbit hole, the bottomless pit that ain’t got no bottom…But that doesn’t offer any peace of mind to either of us today and it’s just come to the point where we simply exist on this totally nonverbal level of primal basic animal communication where the only real dialogue between us is fucking or riding to and from the spot on the motorcycle.  We don’t fight nearly as much lately as we have in the past, but I don’t know if that’s even a good thing or not anymore…We just sort of live on this foggy surreal spinning ride and we got no idea where it’s taking us. I know I could do better and I really doubt she could do better than me… So sometimes it feels like I’m really getting the shit end of the stick here but what can I do? We’ve wound up here together somehow in this bizarre relationship we both hate and are both powerless to break away from. There’s this brutal sexual energy that keeps us bound together like we’re on a fucking chain gang and I’m thinking where will this end?As many times a day as she wants to go cop, that’s how many times a day I am able to fuck her and cling to her dying body like a jackal feeding on an antelope but who’s feeding on who at the end of the day?

Today’s been four times and that’s on the heels of a thirty-six-hour lights-out blackout where I fucked her six times in her sleep and she wound up sleeping and I didn’t. No wonder I feel like some vampire has slipped into my bloodstream and is eating my life force away from the inside… And nothing seems to stop my boundless compulsion for her - nothing but the most absurd behavior or the foulest degradation can tear me away from her. Tonight at the end of her last run she came up to me all sweet and tender and she’d put on her mini skirt and the cute little purple farmer’s daughter purple blouse I’d bought her in Buenos Aires, just to get my attention- she knows exactly how to reel me in every time, well almost cause when she wakes me out of a sound sleep before noon I want to fucking slaughter her, but for now it’s still early and my dick is still responsive to her seductions and I still feel like the luckiest man alive or half alive, whatever ya wanna call It. I don’t call it anything anymore. I’m too tired.So here she comes slithering up beside me all cute and sexy and seductive, the cosmic Lolita waif in her skimpy mini skirt and her knobby knees and pretty bottomless flashing acid eyes and pink baby doll lips and I go to kiss her and it hits me like a graveyard sucker punch and I tell her “Baby Jesus, when’s the last time you brushed your teeth man? Your mouth smells like an open grave!” But she just keeps kissing me and rubbing up against me like a cat in heat and I know she wants drugs needs drugs.But something strange has happened and these days she’s really horny, really wants the dick just as bad as she wants the drugs and I can feel it, you just know when there’s a change like that going on, especially when you’ve fucked somebody the thousands of times I’ve fucked Narcisa. This morning it was different when she woke up out of the depths of her crash-out, then she really didn’t want to fuck at all, just wanted to get it over with and go get high and she even tried to talk me out of it with a shifty shit-eating grin on her sweet face, telling me she knew I’d fucked her in her sleep and I said I’d only tried and she kept waking up and pushing me off and she looked at me and called me a liar but I stuck to my guns and she had no way of proving it cause she’d been incoherent. Shit, I could’ve let a pitbull fuck her in the ass for all she knew and the truth is we were both lying and both telling the truth a little but she backed down cause she was in a pretty good mood for Narcisa in the morning and she knew she was in for it anyway so she just laid back on the sofa and spread her angel legs and said “So hurry up Cigano and be fast! I gotta defacate and if you taking too long I gonna sheet all over you, got it?”And I thought that would be a new one, even for me and Narcisa, but I didn’t like the image. I fucked her as fast and listlessly as she got fucked and that was it but she was happy and she still got paid a big 40 and I didn’t mind, taking into account the six times I’d fucked her or fondled her beloved bony ass as she slept and snored. So I didn’t really mind fucking her quick and giving her the 40 and just the idea of being rid of her for a few hours was nice and I could go back to sleep and pretend to be living a sane and normal existence so it was all good.But now, later into the day, further into her crack run it was a whole different deal, now the sex is real raw and desperate on her part and on mine too cause we just feed back and forth like that so I really don’t mind keeping going today till my dick falls off and I go home again and take a nap while she goes off to cook her brains some more and I fall asleep and dream of me and Narcisa in New York and I really regret not having spent more time with her when she was there and I even remember that last summer I spent in NYC before moving back to Brazil for good.I’d had a little heroin addict punk rock junkie named ‘Chaos’ at least that’s what the tattoo across her chest said and I’d fucked her at least twice a day and she was young and beautiful and horny and great, but now I think I could’ve been with Narcisa that whole time and it’s just one of those little regrets you can’t do aything about anyway. I dont even know why that keeps coming into my mind. I should know better, know that things all happen when they’re supposed to just like me and Narcisa are happening now.But anyway, I had this dream where we were in NYC together and she takes me to the place where she lived with her magic Jewish gringo and we go to sneak in so she can show me a part of her story and she still has her key and I tell her he probably changed the locks and she just laughs and sure enough her key opens the door but as soon as we get in I see there’s people in there so we beat it the fuck out and when we get downstairs and get on the bike I hear all these catcalls and wolf whistles and I look back and Narcisa’s climbing on the back of the bike but she’s lost her panties like a little girl and her skirt is all coming undone and there’s a school bus and a garbage truck and all the schoolboys and garbagemen are having a great time ogling her bare white ass and she gets off the back of the bike to fix her skirt and it just falls off and she’s standing there naked and stumbling around like a drunk trying to pull her skirt up.Now here comes this big tall black garbageman saying “Whoooeee, now I gonna get me soma dat nice white meat chicken” and as he moves toward Narcisa, I pull the ballpeen hammer out of my back pocket, the everpresent ballpeen I used to always carry back in the day in NYC when I ran with Hells Angels and carrying a ballpeen in your back pocket was as natural as carrying a comb or something.Anyway, I pull out the ballpeen and hold it in my right hand and I walk right up to this big guy and say “That white meat chicken got an owner, dog. If you wanna tear off a piece of that shit you gotta go through me and the price for ten minutes is a five oh… You got that kinda cake, garbageman or do you wanna argue?”As I brandished that bad old ballpeen, I guess he could sense I’d just as soon crack his garbageman skull as stand there looking at him and he split.I woke up thinking of the dream as I got dressed to go looking for Narcisa again calculating that it was about time for the end of her run and time for another desperate crack-fueled lust-fest and as I rode off down the street on my way up to the Casa Verde, I remembered something she’d told me the other day, she’d said:”I get fucked more times in one week with you Cigano then in a year and a half the marry with the gringo half your age. Fala serio, man - I never seen the man so sick to fuck all day like you, an’ that’s after being a whore all the year in Copacabana and having the date with all kind of the mans. Shit, before I am 15 year old I been in every one the best hotel in Rio De Janeiro from Sheraton to Copacabana Palace president suite and all the big penthouse in Ipanema to turn the trick for the big money 300 dollars a fuck and now I only e’stay with you for so little money and I don’ even care, cause you take care for me like nobody ever do before and you still fuck all day and night and never tired…

Well what can I say to that? Its true and when you have such a strong attraction to someone as I got to Narcisa you really never get tired , well almost never…But now its four in the morning and I’ve been fucking her every four hours asleep and awake for the last three days now and I am so fucking destroyed it feels like every cell of my sleep-deprived fucked-out existence just went ten rounds with Mike Tyson on crack and acid then got fucked up the ass by the crack monster like Mary’s little lamb before being made into little lamb stew, crack pellets and smoked up and farted out her fine defecating ass.And now I’m thinking what the fuck am I gonna do? because it’s that horrible witching hour in Rio De Janeiro for me and Narcisa, between 4 am and noon when all I want to do is sleep and of course she just wants to keep going and there is terrible conflict in our respective agendas of priority that has ended up in violent conflict in the past and I’m too goddamned tired to go to fist city with her. I’d rather just throw her a mercy 20, without a fuck, just to get rid of her and get some sleep but even that won’t do cause she’ll just come back when she runs out to extort more money for more crack and it’s times like this I wish I had some secret hiding place where she can’t find me at seven in the morning.I truly wonder if it’s all worth it and if, someday, she will reemerge from the ashtray that is her unholy empire to rise up like a magnificent phoenix reborn from her ashes and fly fly away back to Alpha Centauri or wherever the fuck she’s from.Narcisa has lost all control now…  Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

“Jonathan Shaw’s Narcisa- Our Lady of Ashes is one hell of a wild ride through the bizarre netherworld of his own damaged consciousness. His experiences are real and his language and insights kinetic and brutal. This is what the French would call “littérature maudit”, and Shaw’s writing certifies him as a subversive and criminal inhabitant of the world of human expression.”
- Jim Jarmusch

So it’s 3:30 in the morning but I’m still up wondering why I can never sleep like a normal functioning human being in this city where everyone has 8 am wake up calls including myself. Why I feel lonely and isolated today, the way Narcisa must feel sometimes when she’s all alone up there in the favela. I worked all day at the coffee shop on Cahuenga and Franklin writing and emailing and sitting with Amy, Jonathan’s ex who is adorably pregnant and married to Noah Levine. Then I sent some more emails trying to set up a meeting in Berlin for a European book tour, went to see a guy about a thing, ate a hamburger really quickly and ran off into the night to seek some validation. Went to 86, the best decorated new bar in Hollywood, then stood outside of Vine Bar for a minute and felt empty so I wound (as usual) with Nicky at the Cafe 101 and drank some tea. When I got home I emailed Jonathan and told him to call me, but he didn’t.

I’m assuming right now he has a pillow over his face and is sleeping away under Brazilian summer sun. I missed him tonight. Tonight was painstakingly lonely. And then I realized, we’re all battling the same loneliness. It’s not about validation from other people. It’s about validation from yourself. Someone asked me what I wanted today and my answer was “oblivion”. And as true as it rang in that particular moment standing in front of the bar, it’s not true. Feelings are important. They are the only real thing in life. Everything else is an illusion- matter, time, space… it all comes from a feeling. Why would I not want that? I wish someone would explain that to Narcisa.

NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.
As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.

It’s eight in the morning and I got nothing to do with my life and that’s the truth, and Narcisa’s been up driving nails into my head for days now and it’s raining and I give up and give up and give up again.

I’ve told her everything I know or tried to anyway, I’ve pointed out all the exit routes I know in answer to her little song “can you show me the exit to this shit world?”Yeh, I’ve given her all the information I got, delivered the goods, all the lectures, read her all the books, taken her to all the meetings and the clinics and doctors, cried all the tears, prayed all the prayers - and still she won’t give up, she cannot admit defeat and she’s living in a swirling hell of memory and torment and her goddamned ego will not cannot fucking let go and this is Hell.I am there and she is there and we are there again and again and again forever. Shit shit shit.

Today she came and woke me up again from a sound sleep at seven in the morning again, of course, and I’m thinking is this really what it takes to live as an artist? Is this really what old Bukowski meant when he told me some 35 years ago to fuck off and get a life? Is this a fucking life I’ve got here or just some nightmare replication of Past life karmic retribution?

So here I am again again again standing in the doorway in my underwear as she creeps in trembling and crying toxic crack tears saying some other crackhead aquaintence from the Casa Verde, or from hell (same thing) followed her in the street all the way to the favela and tried to steal her drugs and she punched him in the face and he tried to kill her and I just shake my head thinking what a life, is this what Bukowski was talking about? Shit… It’s the second time already this week she’s come slithering in like this, the other night it was the same thing, she’s getting worse fast I’m thinking… Just a couple of nights ago I remember she’d been wandering around the dark metro station in the middle of the night- God knows why. With Narcisa there is no why, no why not, it just is. So some guy followed her and grabbed her and tried to drag her into the bushes. She managed to escape and call me and I got on my motorcycle and went to get her and when I said let’s ride around and find the bastard and see how he likes getting his head hammered in, I already knew it was useless, that it really wasn’t any person or human power that was stalking her now through the dark streets of Catete now, but incarnate spirits of the damned that her very soul sickness was attracting to her as the inevitable consequence of her own steadfast refusal to give up and throw in the towel and just accept all the help that’s been trying to ger through to her for years as she stumbles and struggles down the crooked path to hell that’s been laid out for her. Like it was laid out for me, for all of us who, like Narcisa were simply born into this world of torture and betrayal with the Devil’s dick up our asses..

I told her again and again that she was no different than so many others, than me and if I’d found a way out then she could too but she’s just never wanted to hear it so that’s that and she’s sealed her fate again another day, another night of pounding fear and torment. She just stood there in the middle of my room and put her arms out like Jesus on the cross above her old drooling sedated mother’s bed of nails and broken dreams and said

“This is me, Cigano. This is my life.. I am born to this, born to be a whore, a begger, a bum, a loser. I got nothing. I don’t WANT nothing! Only thing I want is for feel pleasure! I only wan’ it the Sensation and the feeling, Cigano, got it? Feeling. Sensation. I don’ wanna think or talk or listen to anybody opinion or stupid e’story ’bout nothing! I only wan’ it the feeling, Cigano, the most extreme feeling and sensation, got it? That’s it, nothing more! I am the whore, an’ I only want to give it the pleasure to the man and I only wan’ you give me the money so I can take the drugs and enjoy it the life, that is the plesure for the Narcisa and that’s all I wan’ from the life, got it? That’s it!” 

I just looked at her with sadness and pity, the way you look at some terrible tragic disaster and shook my head and said nothing as she took off her shorts again and laid back on my sofa and spread her legs for me, for my pleasure and for hers. Shit..

A half hour later she left, saying, “I no going back to the Casa Verde no more. Now if you wan’ for look me, I gonna be up on the favela for e’smoke in there.” I knew how dangerous it is up there and I knew she didn’t care and I just shook my head again as I watched her leave and I wondered again if today would finally be her last day in this shit world she hates among the living she hates but sometimes longs to be one of because of the ’sensations’ she’s so hungry for.

A few hours later I woke up bleary-eyed and stumbled down to my motorcycle and rode across town for my noon apointment with Dona Marta, the elderly gypsy spirit medium who’s been advising me from the very start of this madness. After waiting awhile in her living room and smoking two cigarettes to wake up, a young gypsy girl came in from the back and told me Dona Marta would see me now. I walked into her little ‘consultorio’ and she stood and greeted me warmly with a kiss on both cheeks, then we sat down. She looked into a clear crystal glass of water sitting on the table between us and watched the movie, telling me about my life. The first thing she said was:

“You’re very worried about the girl. You should be. She’s had many crises, and drug relapses, and now she is going down very fast.”

She was quiet for a moment, looking deep into the water in the glass. Finally she shook her head and spoke.

“The outcome is not good, my son. She is not long for this world, poor thing.”

I just sat there as I had done many times before and I cried. As she spoke on. “You have loved her and been a true friend to her soul. And she has really tried to love you too and let herself be loved. But it is just too much for her. It is too late for her now. She has given up on this world and now she only wants it to end. She really does want to die. It is what she really wants - and she will have what she wants.”

I sat there crying softly as she spoke, cried and cried because I knew it was true. I could see it in Narcisa’s eyes, her body language, her whole demeanor, I could smell it in her hair - she is giving up the fight. And not in any way she could come back from to find recovery like I had done. She had simply layed down her sword and her shield on the battlefield of her life and lay down and spread her legs in defeat for the enemy, for the Grim Reaper’s final cold embrace to come and lift her spirit out of this body, this life, to show her where’s the exit to this shit world at last.

Poor Narcisa. She really never had a chance here.

THE BEACH 

Now as I sit here on the beach with my friend Tonico at day’s end, I think of how I would like to take Narcisa’s unrepentant, self-righteous asshole Born-Again Christian mother out into the woods and tie her to a tree and pour sugar water over her and watch the big red ants and other jungle insects slowly eat her alive while yelling in her fat, stupid face,”Where’s your fucking Jesus now you stupid cunt. Now you think about what you did to your children you crooked old cow! Now you think of Narcisa, the sweet innocent child you destroyed, you heartless old cunt! This is for Narcisa!” I am yelling as I watch the big jungle ants crawling all over her stupid face, biting eating devouring her corrupt flesh as she screms and cries. And then I spit right in her eye and walk away…

Narcisa’s almost dead at the end of the last four day run and still she wants to keep going - she asked for food though which was a sign she was about to crash and I put some downs in her soup and watched her go out. Not before she almost tore her skin off scratching at her detoxing poisoned hide, complaining and bitching and lamenting her bitter existence. She wakes up thirty hours later - incredibly I too manage to sleep a full twenty-five hours too, and I haven’t been up for days smoking crack - maybe its all the sex and close proximity with her insane tweeked out energy - whatever- but the sleep is always welcome.

Of course she wakes up bitching and insulting me but I’ve gotten wise to her tricks and I know she’s just trying to get me to pay her to leave. Of course I always offer her an alternative, but she wants no part of it. She’s got the TV on, watching some stupid yankee sitcom and she says “Take me with you when you go to the states next time, Cigano” then I just can’t take it anymore and I tell her,

“That’s up to you. If you want to go anywhere with me besides bed, you would have to quit what your doing and get recovery - like this I ain’t taking you anywhere and you know it. Its all up to you.”

Then the shit starts… “When it’s time for me to dance for you and be the wild crazy sex maniac whore, then you like it, but now you complain and you want me to stop…”

“No, I didn’t say I want you to stop baby - I just said you’d have to stop if you wanna do anything more with me than this - of course I like a wild crazy whore, whaddya think. I’m a man. What man doesn’t like that shit? But that doesn’t Make me an idiot whose gonna marry one and carry some sick monkey around the world to fuck up my life too.. My name ain’t John Gold baby” I laughed, rubbing salt in for her. “You wanna run with a big dog, you’re gonna have to get down off the porch, baby… That’s up to you”.

 After that she just told me to shut it and take her to the spot and I did.

When I gave her a mercy 20, which I thought was pretty generous being that I hadn’t had a fuck in days and had been feeding and taking care of her like a crippled mutt, she groaned and complained a bit and I just laughed and she shut up pretty fast. She knew. That must be the worst part for her.

I went for a ride down by the beach and looked at all the other stupid slaves like me and her milling around on their Sunday leisure too stupid and stunned by beer and sunshine and football to even think of their plight and I wondered who’s worse off them or Narcisa? And for a moment I even felt pretty fortunate…

An hour later she called all shook up and crazed and begged me to go get her out of there and I told her to walk down to the Paderia Santo Amaro - ten minutes later I picked her up and she said she wanted to go back to my place and “take a pill and smoke a joint and ‘relax‘” and I saw she was bad off, all jittery and pallid in a cold sweat so I gave it my best shot and tried talking to her for awhile while I rode her around. She had no choice but to listen to another of my lectures. I just said I was constantly trying to show her a way out but I couldn’t do anything to help if she didn’t want it.

“If you like this arrangement baby, you the fucked up crack whore and me the sicko sober john, its ok for me- I’m not the one whose throwing his life away at the end of this little drama. The fact I’m even wasting my breath trying to show you a way out is a simple act of love… That’s God, baby, not me. Don’t you think its a real coincidence that God would put somebody like me right in front of you who’s living proof that an addict can recover? I don’t have to try and help you, ya know. If I just wanted a good time girl to fuck around with, I could sure do better than you, don’t you think? There’s a gang of fucked up whores on every street corner for a guy like me to have his fun with - but friendship, love and respect, that’s a lot harder to come across. If you don’t think so, just keep going. You’re gonna have to learn the value of things the hard way I guess. Too bad, but its on you, so don’t blame me. You’re making your bed and you can sleep in it.”

She finally got me to take her home and then of course she only wanted to take off her clothes and get fucked and leave. Its a funny thing, cuz I could feel that by fucking her, I was giving her something more, I was giving her my life force, my energy, my love and something more - something vital, something human. She clung to me like a drowning man holding a life preserver as I fucked her and she moaned and ghasped like I’d hardly ever noticed and her pussy was sopping wet and I could just tell there’s something powerful going on when I fuck her, beyond the power of thousands of words and stories and opinions and theories I could offer her…

I still don’t know what the fuck is going on, maybe she’s digging the hole to the bottom with me, cuz after opening herself up to somebody the way she has to me, there’s no way its not gonna hurt when I step off again - and I will have to and she knows it and I know it and maybe that’s just the road to recovery or death, whichever comes first. I should know better than anyone just how dark it has to get before the dawn’s light can shine into the heart of a junkie- I’ve been there. Copyright Jonathan Shaw 2008. All Rights Reserved.NOTIFIÇAO: Os eventos neste site são contos de ficção - registrados na Biblioteca Nacional com todos os direitos autorais revertidos ao autor, Jonathan Shaw. Os personagens mencionados são interamente ficticios. Certos eventos, personagens, lugares e relatos foram baseados em fatos reais, porém qualquer semelhança a qualquer pessoa vivo ou morta se trata de pura coincidência.As vários fotografias apresentadas se encontram com o rosto distorcido para preservar o anonimato das modelos que representam personagens fictícios.